Should we build another Tower of Babel?

When you are an evangelical thought leader and you wish to write about a particular topic, you must invent an imaginary person with an imaginary question. This way, it makes you seem very important and wise. Anyway, this is for Steve, who asked “how do I begin a think piece when I can’t think of a good hook?” Another thing you must always do is mention the phrase “my team,” so that your readers know that you have serfs orbiting around you at all times, and that is for Ann, who asked “how do I get a reference into the opening paragraph that I can call back to at the end?”

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Probably one of the most famous stories of the New Testament is the Tower of Babel. It was called Babel because in the Greek this means “babble,” which is what it sounded like when God changed everyone’s language to something other than English, which is what Christians speak.

What was the plan for the Tower of Babel?

When I was in Sunday School and they taught us Bible stories by putting felt cutouts on a flannelgraph board, they told us that men built the tower so they could climb into heaven and, like, conquer it or whatever. But I’m not sure that’s actually in the Bible. So maybe it was just dudes building dude stuff. Also, I have some questions about how you would go about conquering heaven.

What went wrong with the Tower?

Folks, not to be an armchair morning quarterback, but let’s talk about other people’s mistakes.

Probably the biggest problem with the Tower of Babel was that it looked like a big boner pointing up at the sky. Whenever the churches would have Mom’s day out picnics around the tower, all the repressed Baptist ladies would be like MMM HMMM and giggle and dare each other to take selfies with the tower in the background while doing inappropriate poses, like pretending to grab the tower. Then the women would come home all riled up and put on the Good Sweatpants and wait for their husbands to get home from work so they could conceive another daughter named Madison or Paisley.

Could a tower actually reach to heaven?

It would have to be very tall, enough to reach to the top of the clouds, like perhaps one hundred feet or so. If I know my flannelgraph theology, angels like to stand on top of the clouds, so as long as you can jump off the top floor and land on a cloud, it will work.

(But let’s not rinse words: my youth pastor says that a Proverbs 31 woman won’t care how tall your tower is.)

Should we try to build another tower?

Now we’re getting at the crust of the matter. Typically, when people get caught up in their own hubris and think they can be the exception to God’s plan, they end up failing spectacularly. But I think it will work this time.

Yes, we should definitely build another tower. And we can finance it like this: whoever donates the most money gets to go up first. After that, whoever has the strongest brand can go up. Also, physically attractive people get to move ahead in the line, but not past me.

What will we do if we reach heaven?

If I understand the Bible correctly, this is what will happen: all the rich people will go up first and be like “we paid a bunch of money, can we just come in?” and that will probably work, because in the old days churches used to offer tickets to heaven all the time, it was called selling indifferences.

When we get up there, the key will be to just act cool. Act like we’ve been there before. If you go up there behaving like a tourist, taking pictures of everything, you’re going to ruin it for the rest of us.

What if we get in trouble?

I suppose there is a possibility, of course, that we get in trouble for sneaking into heaven. If we do, we will just point at Enoch and be like “he didn’t die either, but he gets to be here!” and if that doesn’t work, maybe we can point at the thief who hung next to Jesus and be like “he was only a Christian for like five seconds! He doesn’t even have flannelgraph training!”

And then if all else fails, I will just act like it was an honest mistake. I didn’t mean to sneak into heaven. I didn’t know where the tower would lead. I was simply acting on instructions from my team.

*Weekly-ish articles are free; periodic special articles are behind the paywall. Substack won’t let me set the monthly subscription lower than $5, so I made the yearly subscription $30, which is $2.50 a month, which seems about right. Thanks for reading :)